


The Long Way Home

by Vespaer



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bring Jim Hopper home, Eventual Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, F/M, Jim Hopper is alive, Jopper, Season 3 Finale, thE AMERICAN - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-20 07:28:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22078342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vespaer/pseuds/Vespaer
Summary: Takes place afterThe Fire Under the Blanket.  The Gang discover the nature of the Upside Down, and the nature of the link between it and our world.  The denizens of the Upside Down feed on our fear, and exist through our imagination.  They know it's possible that Hopper is still alive and trapped inside, and they know that all of this time they've been able to manipulate the form the Upside Down takes through the D&D campaign they've been playing.  So, to give Hopper his best chance at survival, they guide him through a hellscape of their own design to a point of rescue through a new campaign, written and based on a story El tells them - a story only she and Hop know.  A memory of his time during the Vietnam War.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Joyce Byers & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: Jopper Big Bang 2019





	The Long Way Home

**The Long Way Home: Chapter One**

_Sometime after Memorial Day weekend, 1986_

The flowers' little periwinkle blue petals danced like tiny fairy wings on the light midsummer breeze. The late sunset caught the vase just right, the planes of its glass surface showering colorful prisms of light all across the headstone it graced. Billy's final resting place was beautiful and peaceful, tranquil aside from the slow traffic coming and going from the diner around the corner, and the cooing of evening doves roosting in the willow tree down the hill... the tree tracing its long, slender boughs across the dewy grass of... that other grave.

Chief Jim Hopper's grave.

There was something about that warm, low sunlight. Max was hoping it would comfort her, would make her feel at peace. But it only made her feel cold... shriveled inside by the bitter unfairness of it all. The school year had passed, whether they'd wanted it to or not. An entire year had slipped away like sand through their fingers, but everyone was still hurting as if it had all happened just yesterday, and no amount of summer vacation was enough to bury it beneath the dunes of memory. She wrapped her hands around her elbows to ward off a weird inner chill, and Lucas draped an arm around her shoulders as if tucking her tightly against his sweaty, pubescent armpit was going to help. In this heat.

Well... it kind of did. Sure. It was the token of affection, of support. It was the effort. She succumbed to the old, easy habit of laying her head on his shoulder. Sometimes he knew her better than she knew herself. She was fiery and independent to a fault, but this time he was right - she did really need to be held in that moment.

"Thanks for coming with me," she sniffed. "I know Billy was never... uh... he wasn't..." She had no idea what she was trying to say. "With you and me..."

"You shouldn't have to be alone here," he told her firmly. "This isn't about Billy. This is about you."

That was all he needed to say.

"Things are just... you know," she answered him. "Ever since Billy's gone..."

Ever since Billy was gone, Max's step-father no longer had his whipping post. So now, further exacerbated by his guilt and his grief over the loss of his son, he was looking for a new one. Max never realized what an umbrella from the storm her brother had been. And now she lived in fear. Not just the larger fear for her own life and safety, but smaller fears, too. A week ago she'd stepped out of the shower and caught her mother in her bedroom, rifling through a box in the back of her closet. At first she'd thought she was spying on her or searching through her things, but then her mother had shushed her and closed the door, begging her to keep her voice down.

She'd been stashing money away. Small denominations, just a little at a time, nothing her husband would notice. She'd been saving it for the right time - the right time to break them both away.

But what if it wasn't enough? What if they couldn't leave? What if they couldn't afford to make it out there on their own? Max was almost old enough to bag groceries at the local supermarket - she could bring in extra income the same way Will's older brother did for their family. But what if it still wasn't enough? What if they went hungry? What if they became homeless?

What if they had to move away...?

Just like Will and his older brother? Just like El?

"I really don't want to go home tonight," Max confessed to her boyfriend, and he only squeezed her tighter. Maybe a summer job wasn't a bad idea. It would keep her busy, making money - it would keep her away. If school was still in session, she could just tell her parents she was at the library, studying. Before the Byers moved away... before El moved away... she could have just spent the night with her friend and Chief Hopper. In spite of the man's fickle temper, there hadn't been a single person in Hawkins who reeked of safety more than that man had.

But that was before.

And now... everything was broken and wrong. Strangely... upside down.

Now, Max needed her friend more than ever. Hawkins needed Chief Hopper more than ever. Hawkins needed the Byers family more than ever. Not because anyone else was dying... except for maybe her. But their absence was a wound that refused to heal, and the terror in her home was the blood that seeped inexorably from it. Hawkins had lost some of its warmth and its light when they left, and even the very ground beneath her feet felt like it was festering.

Ground like Billy's grave.

A rustle of leaves and wings caught her attention and she turned to watch the little flock of doves leave the willow tree down the hill in search of a more favorable spot to sleep for the night, having been disturbed by nothing more diaphanous than the wind that carried her worries.

"It's weird," she muttered to Lucas, watching the last few rays of sunlight slip away from Chief Hopper's headstone. She nodded her head toward his grave. "It's so... flat."

It was true. Whereas tender shoots of new, late-spring grass were beginning to fully carpet the loamy mound of Billy's yearling plot, the ground beneath Chief Hopper's remained unbroken. Pristine, verdant, and... flat. And completely empty. Standing there, Max felt a mild sense of closure knowing that her brother was only separated from her through death and a few feet of dirt. But Chief Hopper... nothing was left of him. A cold block of granite bearing his name was the only proof he ever existed in the first place.

Max was devastated for her friend. El could never visit her father's grave and know that he was there. Right there. So close she could almost touch him. And not for the first time or the last, she missed her friend again. To have a companion in this grief... nothing in this world could have been so valuable. So naturally, it was far out of her reach. As far from her as her friend was from her own father's grave.

"I wish I could just have you over," Lucas told her. "Maybe we could convince my mom that you're spending the night with Erica..."

"No way, she'd never buy that," Max muttered in response, tapping the lip of her skateboard against the toe of her sneaker. "But I'd settle for dinner."

"Yeah, of course, yeah. That'd be great. We should get going, then, if we're gonna let her know."

"Yeah."

Rationally, Max didn't want to keep Mrs. Sinclair waiting on her son to come home for their evening meal. She didn't want food getting cold on the table. She didn't want to just show up and surprise her with an extra mouth to feed. And she knew she'd have to call her own mother to explain her sudden absence. She knew she'd have to leave her mother at home alone with... him. But Max wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere these days. The longer she stayed in one place, the less she had to worry about where she'd be next. There were times - small times, secret times - when she almost wished she could sink down into the earth and curl up next to her brother. She nearly envied him. This was all over for him.

But for her... it was just beginning.

A storm was brewing in her home. And she really missed her super-powered friend. And her dad... the Chief of Police.

* * *

Joyce Byers was burning the candle at both ends. A large part of her life had been spent sleepless like this, so it wasn't exactly uncharted territory, but she'd have given anything for any kind of a solution up to, and including, bashing a cast iron skillet against her head. Tomorrow was supposed to be a big day for her. She, along with her newly minted realtor license, was supposed to show a charming, three bedroom condo in a newly renovated Chicago high-rise to her first potential client. Her partner-in-training, Kevin, was likely to show up at seven a.m. sharp with coffee and trendy, inner-city health food smoothies in hand, ready to prattle endlessly and energetically to her about everything from crown molding to hardwood floors to central heating and cooling. But instead of sleeping the bags away from beneath her eyes, she was spending hours and hours just staring at her ceiling and mentally tallying each and every one of her present worries.

For starters, the move from quiet, pastoral Hawkins, Indiana to an alien, concrete jungle like Chicago was a harsh one for her and her family, in spite of the brief time she'd lived there in her youth. Although she felt safer for having put distance between them and the supernatural horrors that had plagued them for the past few years, having found comfort in the anonymity of being absorbed by greater numbers, there were other, newer, more real dangers. Things like traffic. Things like crime. Things like pollution and smog. And the noise... oh, the noise. Chicago was a howling cacophony of trains, shouts, honking horns, and stray dogs. Chicago was like a tightly wadded mass of bodies crawling all over each other - tossing and turning and they never slept, so neither did she. This city may crush its walls around her little family, but at least its perils were surmountable.

But then there was her family, itself. There were other changes that had befallen them.

Primarily, Jonathan. Jonathan was moving out. Moving on, growing up. Ending this chapter of his life to begin a new one. A tougher, more challenging, more dangerous... more exciting one - one that every mother dreads, but knows will happen eventually. In spite of the... tumultuous experience he'd had during his summer internship in Hawkins, he'd earned himself a scholarship that had paid for his first year at a local community college in Chicago. But his sights were set nearly three hours away on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a bright future in photo journalism with the possibility of a study abroad program.

And... an apartment with Nancy Wheeler. Who was attending the school as well, a communications major.

A place of their own. A _life_ of their own. Their first real steps, all on their own, into a very real, very adult world. And Joyce felt she was reasonably terrified for them.

But then there was Will. Starting high school was hard enough, let alone in unfamiliar surroundings - a massive school with a massive population, an overwhelming sea of faces and names that were nothing more than unfamiliar strangers. A solid wall of dreadful newness. It wasn't just a matter of crippling social anxiety. Two years of Will's childhood had been stolen by the Mindflayer. A crucial two years. So when routine and uniformity had finally returned to his life, his friends were in a different stage of it, steps ahead leaving him steps behind - while they were getting taller and kissing girls and taking driver's ed and making future plans, he was still wrapped in this innocent, dreamlike blanket of displaced childhood.

Not for the first time, Joyce wondered if it'd been wise to move her son so far away from his friends - his security network, the things that kept him tethered to this world and made him feel safe. But safety was the issue. Clearly, Hawkins, Indiana had become a gateway to a hellish other world. And though that gateway was closed, sealed as if by wax through the sacrifice of her dearest, sweetest friend, the risk that it would remain closed was far too great for her to take - not when there was a hungry menace on the other side of it that took a special interest in Will Byers.

And also... El Hopper.

Oh, El Hopper.

Joyce tried very hard not to dwell on thoughts of her old friend... El's father. They were a sure fire way to obliterate any hope for sleep on the night, what little hope remained. But her thoughts never lingered far from him. Not since she'd pulled the weeds from his grave over Memorial Day weekend. Not since she'd stared up at an image of his fuzzy, blue-eyed face plastered all over a smoky projector screen during her brief appearance at their class reunion. Not since they'd seen the lights flickering on and off by themselves inside their old house.

Not since El Hopper had grown sullen and angry, and quietly taciturn.

Not since El Hopper had started breaking the rules.

His ghost might as well have been haunting their new home as well, banging on the walls and wailing at them like a banshee for attention.

She could still remember clearly her last days with the man. Hopper's bark had always been sharp, he'd always been sort of an irascible, passionate person by nature, even when he was young. He'd always been in trouble for getting into fights, his father always forcing him to apologize to one person or another. But in that time shortly before his death he'd seemed more tempestuous than usual. Like a pressure cooker looking for a steam valve. He'd come to her for help, and now she knew why - particularly having been a single parent, herself, for so long.

El Hopper was not like other children. El came with a whole host of atypical circumstances. Raising a teenage daughter alone was troublesome enough, but El... El wasn't just strong-willed and stubborn and fierce, so much like her adopted father, but she was also an unstoppable force. The girl's only limiting factor was her own capacity for compassion, and Hopper had little skill in appealing to such a thing. And while Joyce fared better at it, she still experienced her own moments of failure. There were moments when the girl just couldn't be reasoned with, like any teenager, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.

It was little wonder Hopper had been so upset by what he'd probably viewed as Joyce's casual dismissal of his affections. His temper hadn't just been stoked by something so benign as a romantic rejection or a forgotten dinner date. He'd just been a completely helpless and useless, ordinary human male failing horribly at raising a completely incomprehensible and eerily paranormal, super-human girl.

Simply put, he'd needed help. He'd needed a partner, a mother, a family unit. Joyce knew intimately from her own experience, people weren't meant to do this thing by themselves. He'd been struggling - and even worse, struggling alone. He'd been desperate, not only for a way to share the load and get a little rest, but for a way to get some reassurance that he was doing okay, that he wasn't making an absolute and utter derelict wreck out of his feeble attempt at fatherhood... not when he'd just gotten this second chance. Not after what had happened the last time.

He had tried so hard to keep everything together. He'd tried so hard to be everyone and everything at all times. He'd tried to keep his daughter safe, his loved ones safe, his whole town safe. He'd given himself such little time to squeeze in the potential for a relationship - for some basic human interaction. Because he'd been asked to be so much more than an average father with a girl like El - to be so much more than an average police chief in a town like Hawkins, Indiana. He'd been asked to out-perform reasonable expectations in every area of his life. He'd had to stretch himself to his utmost limits. And ultimately... it had cost him his life.

And he'd gotten so little in return. A lovely headstone over a small, empty plot. By a tree, across the street from the diner. So, so far away from the people he'd hoped would visit his grave.

And now Joyce was the one who was alone with El Hopper, and her wrath. It was difficult to determine who the girl was so mad at - Joyce, or herself.

"You have to do something!" she'd screamed at her the other day before slamming a door in her face. "You saw it too! He's alive and no one's doing anything!"

Which begged the obvious question: what could be done? Short of ripping open a new gate into the Upside Down? And even then... how? The only living thing capable of such an act was no longer capable, a fact that plagued the girl as much as anyone else who loved and missed Jim Hopper. And as much as they loved and missed him... even if the impossible was possible... what were the ramifications of an attempt at rescue? Who else would come to harm? Who else would become aware? It was a knife to her heart to consider, but... was the risk worth the life of one man...? Being the lone adult decision maker in this situation was taxing to say the least. So Joyce Byers rolled onto her other side to stare at the glow-in-the-dark numbers on her alarm clock, aching for the simplicity of a more childlike view of right and wrong and nothing in between.

It was yet one more check box on the list of things that kept her lying awake night after night. Trying to figure out how to explain such miserably unfair, grown-up concepts to a child on the verge of adulthood was another. And trying to decide if she was really making the right choices in the first place.

Somewhere in the distance, a chorus of sirens rang above the din of white noise - late night traffic coursing down the interstate and trains rolling in and out of their stations. The third airplane in the past thirty minutes roared overhead in its descent toward O'Hare's waiting tarmac. And tears began to soak Joyce Byers' pillow. She missed the sound of rain dripping from the tree branches outside her bedroom window. She missed slow mornings that allowed her to stop and savor the smell of the coffee in her cup. She missed singing birds and lazy sunshine, and waving to her neighbors on Main Street while she unlocked the door to Melvald's General Store and Pharmacy.

She missed taking her time counting the money in the register. She missed unpacking boxes and the smell of cardboard, missed the rhythmic cadence of the click and the slap of her price tag gun while she hummed along with the radio. She missed staring out the window, waiting for Hopper to drive his big, brown Blazer down the street on his way into the station. She was out of his way to get there, but worth the daily friendly wave. Worth the daily reminder that there was someone out there who cared. Worth the brief daily connection with another person.

Joyce Byers missed Hawkins, Indiana. She missed her community. She missed her home. And she missed Jim Hopper.

There were so many things she still wished she could say to him. And ask him, too. She understood, now, the impetus and the fears that had driven him to make some of the questionable decisions he'd made with regards to his daughter and how he'd chosen to raise her. She knew what it felt like to lose a child. She knew the emotional toll it cost to plan a funeral for a child. And she knew what lengths she would go to to ensure she never had to do such a thing again. She was familiar with how these wheels had turned inside his head.

But unlike Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers had made the decision that it was finally time to send El Hopper to school. Whether anyone was ready or not, the girl was going to become a woman, and she needed to be prepared to handle the life that lie in wait for her out there. The risks in Hawkins had been many, but in Chicago - in this thick, crowded throng of obscurity... Joyce felt it was possible El Hopper could maybe have an overdue chance at a normal life. Unnoticed, and separated from her past. The girl had to spend some time with an extracurricular tutor in some remedial areas, but she was bright and hungry for the challenge as much as a distraction. But now her first school year was over and she was starting to settle back into old habits. Habits she'd developed with her now-absent father. And it was like her grief was a blanket that she'd pulled back out from the back of her closet, to wrap around her shoulders and bear its burden once more.

El had summer classes to attend, twice a week, to catch her up with her peers. They'd settled into a routine: Joyce dropped her off in the morning, and El took the Blue Line train to get home when she was finished. But just yesterday Jonathon had come home from a short exploratory mission, hunting for an apartment near his new school. He'd intended to spend the next few weeks with his family one last time, to spend part of the summer playing games and making memories before packing his things to move into his new permanent dwelling. He'd offered to give El a ride home, but when Joyce had called the school to make the arrangement, she'd been informed that El had missed her classes. In spite of having been left there by Joyce herself, in person.

So Joyce had raced a flaming trail home in a state of sheer panic, hiccuping sobs of fright so severe that her tears had clouded her view of the road before her. It was amazing she'd made it home in one piece. But just as she'd screamed into her apartment building's parking garage - just as she'd leaped her way up five flights of stairs, just as she'd torn open the front door to clamp her fists onto the receiver of their old, rotary-style telephone to call the police - El Hopper had followed her inside as if nothing had been amiss.

And in that moment, Joyce Byers had understood every drop of Jim Hopper's fathomless fountain of frustration.

The girl had been steadfast and ironclad under Joyce's frantic and feverish brand of interrogation. All she'd had to say for herself was, "No one is doing anything! So I'm doing something!"

That "something" turned out to be visiting a girl named Kali, who'd miraculously come from the same lab in Hawkins, only years before. She was number 008. So the bulk of Joyce's evening, between dinner, bathtime, and bed, had been spent sitting at her kitchen table with her head in her hands, feeling like a total catastrophe. No matter where they went, Hawkins, Indiana was simply destined to follow them. Or, in this case, wait for them to get there. This was just their life.

But El Hopper was wrong. In spite of her perceived apathy, and probably against her better judgment, Joyce Byers _was_ doing something. She knew well the pain the girl was feeling. She knew well the fear and the helplessness and the heart ache. She'd only just given herself permission to privately confess to herself that she'd been in love with Jimmy Hopper for the past thirty years... but then she'd seen, with her own eyes, what could possibly stand up as evidence that Jim Hopper was still alive. And while the veil of time and adulthood had cloaked Joyce Byers in a heavy drape of cynicism... she'd been right about some pretty crazy things before.

An ordinary person could dismiss the blinking of those lights as nothing more than a fault in some shoddy electrical wiring.

But Joyce Byers could not.

And, apparently, neither could the previous tenants, who had moved away after their short span of occupancy, fearing a haunting.

So last night, Joyce Byers had placed some phone calls.

The first was to Karen Wheeler, to ask her to drive by her old house and get the name and number of the realtor handling the listing on the property. She did her best to dodge any questions regarding the potential for a return to the Hawkins area. It was difficult to remain empirical with someone who was left so blissfully in the dark about... things. Joyce did accept her charming attempt at additional condolences, however. Clearly her friend was under the impression that the nature of the relationship between Joyce and Hop had tended toward something more... intimate. In spite of herself, Joyce didn't try to correct her. Weirdly... it felt nice.

The next was to Murray Bauman, or at least to the only number she had for him in her rolodex. She wasn't really looking to ask him any questions. More than anything, she was worried about him - he'd disappeared after the fiasco with the Russians without a trace. She assumed he'd likely gone underground and would surface eventually, but it would've been nice to have an adult to bounce her suspicions off of... particularly one who knew Jim Hopper like she did, and could make educated guesses on what sorts of actions he'd take if he thought he was trapped with no hope of a rescue.

She tried hard not to think of the odds that someone could survive in the Upside Down this long... alone. But it had already been nearly a year...

In any case, she reached Murray's answering machine again, same as she always did.

The last phone call was one she'd dreaded making, but felt she needed to in any case. In the interest of being thorough. She'd called the hotline. The _secret_ one. The one that lead to Doctor Owens.

* * *

_Sometime before Memorial Day Weekend, 1986_

"You're only making this harder on yourself."

Hopper's vision was blurry, but he knew the voice. He knew it well. It spoke strangely fluent English through a thick Russian accent. It was ribald and austere, born from a proud man with crisp adherence to military dress regulations. With a level hat perched above his white brow and neatly trimmed beard, perfectly parallel to the ground. Well, on most days. Days when Hopper could see straight.

The man would come every few days with his cronies - just before his old wounds had time to heal. Just in time to inflict new ones. They kept him in a perpetual state of pain and always asked the same questions. Questions he knew would go unanswered, or at least he should know that by now. It was a battle of wills, then.

The ropes binding his wrists to the hook in the ceiling creaked as he tested them. He could tell by feel that they were now tying sheet bend knots instead of simple, all-purpose clove hitch knots. They'd obviously learned a valuable lesson after what had happened the last time - the last time they underestimated Jim Hopper. They didn't know how schooled he'd been, as an officer and a detective, on how to escape bonds. What better way to know how to rescue a potential victim from complicated forms of bondage? Or predict how a potential detainee would try to escape _his_ bonds? They also discounted his military history as well. They didn't know anything about his time spent as a prisoner of war.

His _first_ time as a prisoner of war. This time, of course, being the second.

What he refused to let them know was how much he regretted his previous attempt at escape, probably as much as they did. Hopper never again saw the guard who lost him, not since that day. Not since the day he'd made it three steps out of his cell door only to be confronted with the most soul-crushing, heartbreaking vision of abject despair he'd ever seen, spiraling away before him: a twisting, labyrinthine, never-ending staircase turning and turning endlessly into an abyss in both directions - a mile or more above him into only darkness and down below him... into a pit.

A pit with a hungry creature. A familiar, hungry creature.

It'd been a long time since Jim Hopper had cried. He cried that day. Like, he curled himself into a ball on his lumpy little fleabag of a cot and wailed like an infant until he nearly threw up. And ever since then, his eyesight had started taking leave of him.

He knew why. He knew what was happening.

"Why do you resist, eh?" the man asked him, circling around behind him to shake the back of his thin, sodden undershirt. Doing so had ripped the fabric away from where it had become enmeshed in the scabs that had formed there just last week, when they'd whipped him. He could feel hot trickles of new, fresh blood saturating the loose belt at his waist, where it was starting to slip low over the narrow bones of his hips.

But he couldn't feel the sting. There was nothing there, no sensation at all, almost as if it was happening to someone else. And there was a reason why.

"Why we do this? Every time?" The man reappeared as little more than a grey blob, wandering into his dim periphery.

It was the same thing that had happened after the war. It was the same thing that had happened after Sara. It was the same thing that had landed him on a heavy dose of broad spectrum anti-anxiety medication, for the treatment of "derealization events" as a result of post-traumatic stress.

He was dissociating. His mind was being ripped in two, cleaved apart like a ripe watermelon. One half wanted to float high above him and pretend this was all a bad dream brought on by reading _The Hunt for Red October_ too close to bedtime. The other half was just waiting to die.

Both had given up all pretense of hope.

"Fine, then. We do this."

The man did his best to convey the seriousness of the situation by loudly kicking aside the thin metal tray bearing the leftover residue of his singular daily meal - a greasy slurry of flavorless mush that flipped a middle finger at every tenet listed in the Geneva Convention. But Hopper was already halfway out of his own skull. Even the sound of the man's voice had started to take on a tinny, canned quality, echoing inside of his mind like a sound chamber.

"We know your government has been spying," he began the usual diatribe and everything started getting dark, like a tarnish forming over a mottled collage of grey and black shapes. "We know about the girl."

And suddenly her eyes swam before his face - round and brown and deep and innocent. Young and hungry and scared and angry. Wide open, searching for secrets, seeking safety. Misted over with a bitter loneliness that mirrored his own. He had needed Eleven as much as she'd needed him, and he needed her now more than ever.

"We know you know about the girl. Tell us about her."

The demand hung in the air like smoke, unfulfilled. Hopper left it behind, slipping away into silent, floating ambivalence. Whatever they did to his body this time, it didn't matter. He didn't care. He was already dead to the outside world - it was just the one in here that was slow to catch up. He didn't know how long he'd been in this prison cell and he couldn't quite remember how he got there, but it felt like it'd already been an eternity. His muscles had atrophied and he could feel his ribs protruding through his skin. He was covered with scars and scabs - not just from the torture, but also from more mundane things like fleas and spiders and bedbugs and rats. Hanging like he was at the present moment, a long, stringy mat of his own hair dangled over his eyes and tangled with the wiry grey nest growing on his face. And he had some sort of a fungal infection sprouting up in places he really, really didn't want to think about.

So... some time had passed. By now, Callahan was probably answering to Powell as the new Chief. The roof in the cabin had probably sprung a leak and cracked open... by now, everything from his recliner to his boxes of memories in the attic were probably a molded, saturated ruin. By now, Joyce had likely met someone new, maybe even the love of her life. If she grieved for him at all, her grief was ending and a new chapter was likely beginning. By now, if El hadn't been remanded into the custody of the United States government, then she was a ward of the state and in some facility somewhere... somewhere where even Mike Wheeler couldn't find her. Maybe to be adopted by a new family... maybe one with a mother this time.

And that was the hardest part of it. Everything was beyond his control, even his own imagination. Jim Hopper had a cruel, creative imagination, and he panicked when he was forced to give up control. He was his own worst torturer. He could handle being whipped. He could handle being cut, being beaten. But it was this loss of control, this feeling of powerlessness - it was this fear that put him out of his mind every time. It crippled him like a broken back. There was still one thing, though - just one - that he managed to maintain a vice-like hold over. And it preserved the very last quivering vestiges of his fragile mental state.

These assholes would never get him to tell them anything about El Hopper.

If there was one thing he still could do, he would ensure these machiavellian fuckwits never found her.

And he knew it prolonged his death. He knew if he'd told them everything they'd wanted to know, he'd be blissfully pushing up daisies by now, his pain over. But that wasn't Jim Hopper. It was just pain, a trivial sacrifice, it was worth it. If Jim Hopper had only one gift, one virtue, that he acknowledged within himself, it was the deep, personal value he placed on his own ability to keep his loved ones safe.

At _all_ _costs_.

Even a slow, arduous, agonizing death.

One he prayed would come, yet never did.

If he ever made it three steps outside of his cell again, he'd fling himself into that pit. Let the demogorgon do him a greater kindness. It was enough to know that, if he was never going to see the people he loved again... at least they could be better off without him. At least he could make that happen. At least he still had control over that.

"Say it - _say it!_ "

He was brought around by the man's sudden scream and a right hook to his lower jaw. The fog lifted for just a moment, just in time for him to witness a bright orange, glowing circle appear somewhere off to his right. And where there had been one, two more appeared alongside the longer he stared. It was possible the duplication was a reflection of his current psychological infirmity... but it was also possible the gleaming orbs could have existed in reality. Whatever they were. And then a smell reached him, a distinctive smell - a smell he'd only smelled once in his life.

In Vietnam.

It was the smell of burning flesh. _Human_... flesh. His own flesh.

Staticky, indistinct shadows coalesced into sharp lines and colors and shapes. A man to his right became a clear figure, one that let a lascivious smile slowly split his face as he pulled the lit end of a cigar away from the meat of Hopper's hanging arm. Smoke was still curling into the air from the blackened ends of his arm hair as the man bit down on the blunt end with those two pearly rows of straight, white teeth. The sheer amount of inhuman glee in his smile was nauseating. He muttered something indecipherable in mush-mouthed Russian and cackled with a foul, stale laugh. But Hopper couldn't feel the heat from his new burns, even as the charred skin remained ringed with red, hot ember. It could have been the shock, he supposed... but he didn't find it very likely.

It had become routine, this endless cycle of torture and interrogation, punctuated by periods of intense quiet and isolation. So repetitive, so routine, that Hopper had truly begun to question the very fabric of his reality - question whether or not he was suspended in some dream state purgatory playing itself out in a neverending loop.

But today suddenly became very different. After what could have been weeks or months or even years of suicidally monotonous doldrum... something happened and everything finally changed.

It started when a low and resonant boom shook the complex. Everything stopped, every sentence dropped, every head turned toward the door. The silence that followed was pointed, though Hopper still swayed on his hook as the echoes of tremors traveled the length of his prone body, much the same way as the quakes he remembered from his time in Twenty-Nine Palms, during basic training.

"Ne dvigaysya," the bearded man in the hat commanded his subordinates as his pounding, purposeful strides took him out of the cell door and onto the railed walkway beyond. He perched both hands on the railing and leaned over the side, peering up and around and down below, searching for the source of the disturbance - one that was very much outside of the ordinary.

And it was like everyone held their breath for a moment. For just a moment, aside from his own breath rattling through his ears to the slow, weak cadence of his pulse, Hopper could've heard a pin drop. He found himself tensed and waiting for that pin to fall and, pulling himself back from the aether where he'd previously hovered, he began to feel the hot sting of the burns on his arm and the ragged prickle of the torn scabs on his back. He was himself again... but only because something was strangely amiss.

Chief Jim Hopper was very well versed with things that were... strangely amiss.

A deep growl arose from the pit below, followed by an otherwordly whine. Even their imprisoned creature had been disturbed. The chaos that subsequently ensued, however, was anything but abrupt - not in the way an explosion or a car accident might happen. It was instead gradual, slowly and steadily building like a volcano, the pressure rising before a great release.

There were shouts, but the voices sounded far away. And then, for a brief moment, a blink in the dark, the lights flickered out before they came back on again. Hopper found himself momentarily forgotten as the men looked at each other in surprise. They pulled their service weapons as the bearded commander began barking his clipped, direct orders. They stampeded down the stairwell and the lights dimmed again. And then the shouts were closer.

The complex shook once more, as if a giant drill was ripping its way through the bedrock foundation beneath them. Agitated, the demogorgon roared and flung its entire body at the fence terminating its enclosure - Hopper could hear its full weight bashing against the chain link where it hung by its claws and chittered and moaned, terrorizing the soldiers that were tasked with keeping the thing imprisoned. Much like Hopper himself.

The tremors, this time, rattled loose a cloud of dust and pieces of plaster from the ceiling that coated his hair and shoulders and filled his eyes and nose. He shook it loose and looked up to find a crack forming at the base of the hook that kept him suspended above the floor. He couldn't understand the wild streak that overtook him, but it was hot and electric, a surge of adrenalin. It was instinctual - it was fight or flight. He swung his legs like a pendulum and pulled against his bonds with all of his might. One more quake could free him.

But then what would he do?

And where would he go?

Seized by an illogical desperation, he grunted as he swung and pulled again, grabbing the attention of the bearded soldier in the hat. The man whipped out his pistol as he spun around to face him, but then the sharp metal clang of an opened door rang out and the shrill shriek of panicked voices drowned any other thought. The commander stopped and listened and stood as still as he could even as the tip of his gun barrel waggled at the end of his outstretched arm. Hopper couldn't understand a word anyone was saying, but the cold set of the other man's eyes gave him enough context to know that whatever was happening wasn't anything good.

"Come, American," the man finally said, pulling a blade from his boot without lowering his gun. "It is time to make yourself useful."

He cut the rope, and Jim Hopper crashed back down to the floor. Before he could summon the strength to right himself back onto his own two feet, the commander squeezed his arm around his throat, forcing him into a choke hold, which was awkward given the man was a head shorter than Hopper was. Like most people. The man yanked on him to set him forward and pushed him out of the cell and down the stairs with his spine twisted at an angle that left him helpless to do much more than comply. So down they went.

Down. Down, down, and fathoms down.

Down toward the howling, growling pit.

Squads of soldiers raced past them, weapons drawn, to face some unknown threat. When they finally reached the bottom, the large set of double doors leading out their present location was once again closed, and work was being done in a frenzy to barricade the thing. If these people were willing to bury themselves inside a hidden, underground bunker alongside a hungry, angry, scarcely contained demogorgon... then Hopper could only imagine what lie waiting on the other side of that door.

The earth shook again, but this time hard enough the lights went out and they didn't come back on. Auxilliary lighting instead took its place, casting long shadows with a dim, hellish red glow. The door pushed back against the hastily constructed rampart with the force, letting a red shaft of light leak in from the corridor beyond. Claxons were screaming on the other side of it with spinning, blinding yellow lights. Hopper was ushered roughly to one side, allowing a group of soldiers the room they needed to set up a pair of fearsome rail guns on stands.

They were being infiltrated. But... by who? Or... what? And where were they? Was it something as mundane as the American military, or... something worse?

The rattle of bone on metal behind him sent shivers down his spine. He didn't need to turn his head to know how close to the fence he stood. He could feel the damp steam of the thing's breath tumble down his neck, could hear its claws slowly raking down the chained links, one by one. But he almost felt pity for the thing. It was just like him.

He, too, was cold and dirty. He, too, was hungry and homesick. He, too, was a caged animal, waiting for an opportunity. And as the apathetic, nihilistic part of his brain that no longer cared if he lived or died stared down that narrow gap in the door, waiting for something to happen... he found the prospect of raining destruction down onto his captors far more appetizing than beating some ill-fated attempt at escape. He didn't know how the Russian commander would see that he made himself useful, but he did know they would stop at nothing to keep that door closed.

So it was time to open the door.

And there was only one way to open the door.

With the last bit of swiftness he had, Hopper stuffed a hand down his captor's boot and grabbed his blade. Before the other man even knew what was happening - before any neural impulse could reach the finger on the trigger of his gun - the point of the blade was sunk deep into the socket of his eye. Hopper pulled the gun out of his hand as he collapsed to the ground without so much as a cry. He made a prayer to the gods of dim light and accuracy, and flung the blade at the soldier guarding the fly wheel that opened the cage.

He raced to the fly wheel. He spun it. And then he opened fire.

He was able to squeeze off four rounds, dispatching four men before they clambered to their senses and turned their weapons on him. He lowered his own gun and squared his shoulders, resigned to his fate. Wherever El was, she was safer than this. They would never find her. They would never know her secrets. Because he would die here with them. This was the best he could do for her, and he was ready.

He risked a glance toward the entry to the cage and his heart sunk, dismayed to find that he'd only managed to crack the thing open three inches.

But three inches was enough for the monster inside to get its talons through it. Three inches was enough to give the thing a hand hold, enough wiggle room to pry the cage open the rest of the way.

The soldiers fired no shots at Jim Hopper, not when they were pinned down suddenly between an unknown invading force and their worst nightmare, now free with its five fanged lips splayed open and slavering. Instantly, Jim Hopper was the least of their worries. Their bullets pelted the creatures thick hide, but it was made of far more mystical, supernatural stuff. Its wounds only slowed it, but nothing could stop it now that it was finally out of its cage. It tore into its enemies the way his father would ravenously annihilate his mother's homecooked Thanksgiving dinner. He mentally shut out their screams, and as his feet slipped over the fresh blood spilled all over the floor, he made his way to the barricade to try to pull the door back open.

The world boomed and shook once more, and when the ground was settled again all of the voices were quiet. Hopper flipped around to face the rampaging beast, knowing he was the last living thing left but the monster had no more interest in him than it did for any of the debris it was tearing away from the makeshift blockade in front of the door. He even found himself casually knocked aside as the thing shoved away a heavy metal gun cabinet that had been upturned over a pile of ammo crates. By the time he got himself out from underneath it, the way was clear, the door was open, and the demogorgon was gone, noisily wreaking havoc upon the last line of defense somewhere further down the corridor.

Curious that the creature didn't immediately start climbing countless flights of stairs to reach the surface, Hopper scavenged an assault rifle that had been dropped by one of the dead soldiers and decided to give chase and see where the path of chaos lead. It was possible the demogorgon knew something he didn't.

He followed the sounds of screams and the trail of blood. They lead him to a room with one single point of entry or exit. In the center of the room, crowned on all sides by dismembered limbs and entrails like some murderous wreath of gore, was a key.

The. Key.

Identical to the one they had destroyed back in Hawkins.

It was quiet - dark and defunct, dormant since it no longer had a mate to reach out there in the world. That they knew of. Yet doubt crept in as Hopper stared at the wall beyond the aperture where its focusing laser would ordinarily have fired.

The wall was red and glowing, and a crack was forming.

Someone... somewhere... was trying to reach their key. But their key was not responding. Which left nothing else but brute force.

The demogorgon was pacing the walls like a tiger in a zoo exhibit, searching either for meat or a way out. It wailed and whined and scratched at the bricks, completely oblivious to Jim Hopper standing there behind it as it searched for the thin places between its universe and this one - completely unaware of the choice Hopper was left to grapple. He hooked a thumb into the cracking leather belt at his waist, remembering once how Joyce Byers had used it to turn both switches and destroy the key back in Hawkins, Indiana.

He could use it to turn the thing on... to connect with who or whatever was on the other side trying to reach them.

He could let the demogorgon slip back into its own dimension, then destroy the key the way Joyce did, and hope that that mysterious other key out there wouldn't rip through their feeble lattice of spacetime anyway, or whatever. He could run his way up that dizzying tower of stairs to find himself somewhere like Antarctica or the Sahara or something, exposed to the elements with no supplies and still no hope of a rescue.

Or...

He could let the key connect, and then follow that connection like a conduit... in the thin, vain hope that it might lead him home.

Through a virulent, poisonous maze of giant, bloodthirsty monsters.

He instantly thought of Will Byers. The kid was just a little boy. He had no military training, he had no experience as a police officer or a detective, he had no skills in survival or stealth, and he still managed to stay alive in that ungodly other world for a short amount of time. Just a boy, nothing more than a child, a little boy.

It was the only hope Jim Hopper had left. It was the only action that seemed reasonable, as crazy as it was. So, he climbed the steps into the control center, he took off his belt, and he looped it around the key that activated the other toggle switch. He stared ahead at that cracking, smoking, glowing, crumbling wall, and he wiped the sweat from his brow.

He took a deep breath, he whispered a prayer for mercy.

He counted to three, and he pulled the switches.

And the wall just burst away. A gateway into the unknown... the chance that Hopper was willing to take.

Anything that might bring him back home to his little girl.


End file.
